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John Reese is launching Opportunity.com
And as I drafted out an email to one of my sub-lists, I ran across a problem that many affiliates may face while promoting Opportunity.com to their lists via email.
For my email autoresponders, I use Aweber.com which offers built in ‘Spam Check’ – a service that flags emails if they are likely to get caught by spam filters.
My first draft was flagged, with a score of 3.7 (very high) – and that was due to my use of “Opportunity” in the email.
So I set up a web-based redirect – this is where you set up a webpage with a different file name, and have it automatically directed to your affiliate page. This is the link I set up: http://Niche2.com/reese.htm
Thinking this would do the trick, I queued my email – and again was hit by a spam score of 2.3 (still high). This was because I used ‘Opportunity.com’ in the text of my email message.
UPDATE (3 hours after posting this note! Maybe you should just ignore the part of my post that follows (colored red), based on this information I got from Alok Jain – scroll below to read it)
So I tried different ‘typos’ (mis-spelled versions) of the word – and ALL got flagged.
- Oppportunity.com
- Opp.ortunity.com
- Opp.port.unity.com
Finally, I got through with this variation:
Op.p.port.unity.com
The finished email looks like this:
Lessons for Affiliate Marketers:
* Use reliable email autoresponder providers who let you test for spam score (Aweber, GetResponse and EmailAces all do)
* Pay attention to your spam score – and try and get it to ZERO (or close to it)
* Use web based redirects for your affiliate links to work around potentially spammy names (more so during big launches, as the sheer volume of emails with these names will sharpen filters!)
* Test different versions of your email to get highest delivery rates. Remember, you can’t earn affiliate commissions from undelivered emails!
Happy promoting!
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UPDATE:
This is what I learned from Alok Jain:
“Thought I should tell you that Aweber discourages this practice since it hurts deliverability. Here’s their blog post about it.
Also, I have had extensive discussions with them about the spam score. I had the same issue. Using free or similar words bumped the score to 2.5 or above. I started using punctuations too and and noticed that open rates were going down.
Long story short, discussed with the guys at Aweber and they say that any score less than 5 is okay. We don’t have to aim for 0.
Since then, I have done several split tests using the actual word (higher spam score) and one with punctuations (score of 0) and every time – the former had better open rates (meaning better deliverability since the subject lines were the same)
Just felt I should share this with ya…
Best,
Alok
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Thanks, Alok. I’m sure my readers will appreciate this as much as I do 
You can learn more from Alok Jain from his website at http://alokjain.in/
{ 1 comment }
Now this is really good information. Frankly even though Aweber is OK with scores up to 5, we should still aim for as close to 0 as possible.
However using too many punctuations does make the email look spammy to general readers who might avoid clicking through. The safe URL with redirect is the best thing to use.
Arun
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